Deeplinks Blog posts about Anonymity

Today, Northern District of Texas District Court Judge David C. Godbey granted EFF's and Public Citizen's sanctions motion against Evan Stone, attorney for Mick Haig Productions, who improperly issued subpoenas to ISPs without court permission in order to obtain the identities of alleged file sharers. The court's blistering opinion speaks for itself, and should be read in full. The court includes a brief overview of its findings thusly:

What’s worse than discovering that someone has launched a man-in-the-middle attack against Iranian Google users, silently intercepting everything from email to search results and possibly putting Iranian activists in danger? Discovering that this attack has been active for two months.

This spring, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) executed a search warrant at the home of Nolan King and seized six computer hard drives in connection with a criminal investigation. The warrant was issued on the basis of an Internet Protocol (IP) address that traced back to an account connected to Mr. King's home, where he was operating a Tor exit relay.

In June, we published an article highlighting the problems with uploading sensitive documents to two Wikileaks imitators, the Al-Jazeera Transparency Unit (AJTU) and the Wall Street Journal'sSafehouse. Apart from the well-documented security problems of both sites, we noted that their terms of use (TOU) offered whistleblowers very little protection.

On August 8, AJTU published its revised TOU, attempting to address our concerns. We've looked through the new terms and we're happy to report some good changes.

The Nymwars rage on. Over the past several weeks Google has been engaged in a very public struggle with its users over its “real names” policy on Google+, prompting blog posts and editorials debating the pros and cons of allowing pseudonymous accounts on social networking sites. But there is one person for whom insisting on the use of real names on social networking sites is not enough. Unsurprisingly, that person is Facebook’s Marketing Director, Randi Zuckerberg. Speaking last week on a panel discussion about social media hosted by Marie Claire magazine, Zuckerberg said,